Saturday 31 December 2016

Reflections On Earlier Reading

Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London, 2016).

One conversation between two people is one event but two experiences. This was never more clearly shown than in the two accounts of the encounter between Marla and Ben. We have no idea of what is going on inside Ben when all that we have read is Marla's experience of their brief bizarre dialogue.

"Chaotic" and "embedded" (see here) seem contradictory but I am sure that they are thesis and antithesis although the synthesis, reality perceived and understood as both dynamic and complete, eludes me. Each person is simultaneously a part of the totality and a part of its self-consciousness but only a part. As yet, I know only seven chapters of this million-word novel although the rest of the text already exists, stretching ahead of me from p. 245 to p. 1174. Right now, most of 2017 also stretches ahead of us. I am certain that it is real although not that it is present - but I am about to read about Snowy Vernall's "...glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time." (p. 245)

Happy New Year.

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